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8 line challenge – brought to you by Daddy Runs a Lot.

You know that kid in class who inevitably doesn’t understand the assignment, and then after you look at it again, you realize maybe he understood it after all, is really a genius and just found it too limiting?

He was to write 8 lines/sentences prompted by a title that I picked for him after poking around his website.

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TITLE: Musical Mundane

I started playing the piano in kindergarten, because I demanded it of my parents, because my dad would play and I wanted to be more like him (honestly, it may mark the final occasion that I wanted to be more like him) and my mother actually found a piano teacher willing to take on a kindergarten kid

I quit piano lessons in the 8th grade, when I was taking lessons from a fancy-schmancy Russian piano teacher because I managed to be so busy that I couldn’t fit lessons into her schedule on a regular basis. Upon quitting piano lessons, I actually started playing piano a whole lot more

I actually & truly admire Barry Manilow

I’ve written a song with the aid of one of my dogs . . . I was just having a hard time with how to start it, and he would stop acting up whenever I would play a certain passage, in a certain key, so that’s how I started the song

I name all of my musical instruments, except my keyboards. I have no idea why I exclude those, but my very first string teacher (when I started playing ‘cello in the 4th grade) told me that I always needed to name my instruments, so I did.

I get as mad when people write ‘cello without the apostrophe at the beginning as I do when people misused the word enormity (the latter means something immensely evil, not something immense). ‘cello is short to violoncello, the full name of the instrument.

I really want a harpsichord, and a sitar. Alas, I barely have enough money to get myself Starbucks once in awhile, and those are freaking expensive instruments

My father has a Steinway upright piano that plays beautifully — when he was young, his mother found it, in parts, in a junkyard and had someone put it back together . . . and when I say it plays beautifully, it really does . . . except if you’re doing a lot of playing in the upper register, where things just seem wonky, This is because I, apparently, at a relatively young age, somehow managed to spill a bloody mary into the instrument while one of my dad’s friends was tuning it. I still can’t put together the string of events as to how a toddler could have knocked a bloody mary into an upright piano, but I like to think that I was trying to drink said drink and decided it needed more Tabasco.

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At first I was confused as to why he didn’t stick to the eight line structure. After another look, I saw that he gave me eight quatrains.

I also asked him to tell me three things that he would like people to know about him that they can’t find on his About Page. I wanted to introduce him to you with some personal trivia. He never gave me that information… unless of course he worked it into his 8 lines…

4 responses to “8 line challenge – brought to you by Daddy Runs a Lot.”

I took piano lessons for 8 years. Then I was too busy in high school to keep it up. While I was away at college, my mom decided she didn’t want the old piano in the basement anymore. It had been a freebie from church and it was never quite tuned. It was also a major PIA to get into the house and my dad had always said that the only way it would come out was in pieces.

Apparently he wasn’t kidding. He chopped that sucker up and burned it in the backyard.

Anyway, what I was trying to say is that because there is no piano in my life anymore, I never play. And I pretty sure if I sat down with some sheet music I would suck.